Faulks Has ‘Devil May Care’ Film Hopes

James Bond centenary author Sebastian Faulks has expressed hopes that his Bond novel ‘Devil May Care’ will one day make it to the big screen. Faulks, who was presenting the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in central London, was quizzed about the paperback edition of ‘Devil May Care’ and the future of Bond by the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ page of the London Evening Standard.

Asked whether he thought the novel will one day be made into a film, the ‘Birdsong’ author commented: “One lives in hope. Daniel Craig is a good Bond but I thought there was a little too much running and jumping in the last one and the romance went out of it. It’s time to bring that back”.

The paperback edition of ‘Devil May Care’, which was released by Penguin in the UK on 28th May, is still riding high in the bestseller lists. When it was first published in hardback, the hardback edition rapidly became Penguin’s fastest-selling fiction hardback in the company’s history. In early June, 2009, at the British Book Industry Awards, Penguin won the Daily Mail Marketing Campaign of the Year Award for the highly imaginative and effective publicity campaign which promoted the hardback edition. The campaign included a well-publicised launch on the River Thames using the Royal Marines, giant posters on the sides of London’s famous red buses, various media appearances and signings by Faulks, and continuous electronic billboard teaser adverts at Piccadilly Circus and other busy locations in London. According to book-trade insiders, Penguin are hoping that the paperback edition might even outsell the hardback edition of ‘Devil May Care’, and are currently exploring yet new ways of marketing Ian Fleming’s original Bond novels.

EON producer Barbara Broccoli, when asked about the novel when it was launched last year, expressed admiration for the book’s story and said it was a worthy tribute to Ian Fleming, capturing the atmosphere of Fleming’s original character perfectly. But she added there are were no plans to film Faulks’s Bond novel.

Meanwhile, another best-selling thriller writer, Anthony Horowitz, who was once seen as a possible Bond-continuation author, recently revealed the influence Ian Fleming had on him as a young boy. Asked to contribute to a newspaper survey on ‘The book that changed my life’ for the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival, Horowitz said: “It would have to be Dr. No by Ian Fleming. It was 1967. I was about 12, trapped in the weird and miserable bubble of prep-school life where my experience of sexual desire and violence edging on sadism was largely restricted to my French teacher”. He continued: “The book introduced me to a whole new world. Even the Jamaican setting seemed impossibly exotic”.